by Carol Anshaw
This was a good time for Alice. She won a Guggenheim last year, now had a Near North gallery representing her work. She had begun to make real money from her painting, something she said she never anticipated, and this left her in a slightly uncomfortable position, richer and more famous than her friends. She tried to obscure her success by staying on in the old loft, although with some new furniture, a real bathroom and kitchen, a thick mattress on her bed—something she special-ordered from Sweden. And her Mercedes was a very old one, well over the line into ironic. In the same way, she had an assistant she never mentioned, who spent a day a week replenishing Alice’s paints, stretching her canvases, cleaning her brushes. The way Carmen saw it, Alice was tiptoeing softly into her new life.
On the way over to the cemetery, Walter put his nose to the wind and Gabe leaned in from the backseat to tell Alice about the American Revolution, which they’d been studying at school. He had taken it upon himself to spruce up Alice’s education, which he thought was tragic. Carmen and Nick had gone to the Latin School where the basics were well covered. Alice, on account of her artistic promise, went to a free school in Old Town, one of those staples of the late seventies where the teachers went by their first names and field trips were to violent or naked performance-art presentations, and reading was not really stressed. The curriculum encouraged Alice’s painting, but left her with certain gaps, like most of history except for how it framed artistic periods.
“Okay, so while Washington was fighting the British,” Gabe told Alice, “Benjamin Franklin was over in France forming an alliance with them.”
“You mean we didn’t even have a country and we were already being diplomatic? Wasn’t that, I don’t know, kind of nervy?”
“The whole thing was nervy. Totally nervy,” he said.
“What about Thanksgiving?”
He looked at her for so long that she turned her head quickly to see the stare accompanying his silence.
“That was earlier, right?” she said, eyes back on the road.
“Uh, yeah.”
“I knew that,” she said. “Way earlier.”
“You did not. You thought Ben Franklin was having turkey with the Indians. And after dinner they all went out to fly the kite. I’m going to make up weekly pop quizzes for you. What if you’re around other adults and you make one of these horrible errors? I have to keep an eye on you. You and the twins. They’re even worse than you. Dad bought them a globe. And then it kind of came out that they thought we live on the inside of the ball.”
At the cemetery, he gave Alice a little rundown on the Haymarket riots, the information that several of the rioters were buried in this cemetery. From there, he moved on to the labor movement around the turn of the century, the fight for the eight-hour workday, the Wobblies, the bomb tossed into the crowd, the dead a mix of workers and policemen. Alice played dumb to humor him. Her academic gaps notwithstanding, she was, thanks to Carmen, well versed in the history of America’s progressive movement. Gabe was good on the facts, a boy thing. Carmen’s concern was that he also got the bigger picture. She had tried to show him that there’s always the history and the secret history. That there were always beneficiaries. To understand how things work, you had to follow the circuit all the way back—to who was getting something out of it. Follow the power or the money, or both.
With friends, more and more, Carmen found injustice talked about in some new abstract vocabulary of large and amorphous concepts, rather than in the old fired-up rhetoric of specific actions against the powers that be. Now the problems had become huge, systemic wrongs not approachable by the remedies of individuals. She hated this. And she didn’t want Gabe to grow up in this new, morally lazy climate. So she brought him along to events like today’s, to see the left as a path.
She was surprised at the good turnout for the memorial. Maybe a hundred people had gathered. Carmen allowed herself the vanity of pulling her hair behind her ear, to show it off. The ear had made her a local hero.
Tom Ferris and Jean were already there, on guitars, banging out rousing union anthems, old songs like “The Springhill Mine Disaster,” and a few new ones they’d written together, like “Barred Doors and Blazes,” about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Gabe and Walter loped off to play with a puppy they’d spotted. Carmen waved at Jean and Tom.
“He looks different,” Carmen said.
“He lost the sideburns,” Alice said. “He’s exposed some face no one has seen for years. He’s rejuvenated his career with ‘Black Earth Blues.’ Fuck him.”
Carmen said, “I know. I’ve heard it a couple of times on XRT.”
“Jean said it might be big. Moving up the charts or whatever.”
“I don’t know how he can do this. It’s invading the girl’s privacy, like claiming an intimate relationship with her.”
“Yeah. But really, how much closer to someone can you be than having killed them?”
“Alice.”
“Here’s what I hate. I hate that it doesn’t matter if we see each other. There’s still this connection, between me and him because we were both in the car. Like in arithmetic. Because of the accident, we’re not just separate numbers. When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”
Carmen looked around to find Gabe and saw Walter peeing on a grave. She hoped it was not some historical figure’s plot. The music stopped, and an old Wobbly, glasses taped together, jacket lumpy with a sweater underneath in spite of the day being so mild, stood in front of Emma Goldman’s grave and started to read an earnest speech. Barely a paragraph or two in, the anarchists showed up. They sprung onto the scene like jack-in-the-boxes.
Carmen flinched in the way she did now at sudden, peripheral movement, a change in the tone of a situation. Then saw this was just the usual harmless theater and unclenched her jaw. The anarchists hopped all over the grave; they sat on the headstone playing kazoos and tambourines and heckling the earnest speaker.
“This is so cool,” Gabe said.
“Well, when you’re an anarchist,” Carmen said as they watched the Wobbly shrug and finally give up on his speech, “I think you have to expect a little dancing on your grave.”
Gabe went over to join the fun.
A refreshment table. Lunchmeat roll-ups, carrot sticks, onion dip. Terrible punch the color of melted cotton candy. Alice drank three cups straight down. Part of her mono was a constant sore throat.
Carmen wanted to say something to Tom about his song, about using tragedy for personal gain. But she didn’t want to make Jean uncomfortable. Jean, who for some inscrutable reason, was still with him. Now the two of them were heading Carmen’s and Alice’s way.
“Jean still thinks he’s something,” Alice said before they came into earshot. “She’s stuck on his fifteen minutes of fame.” Then she put on what she hoped was an extremely insincere smile and greeted Tom. “Looks like you’ve found a way to take those old lemons of ours and make lemonade.”
Tom didn’t flinch. Years onstage had thickened his persona. “I’m just singing out of my own experience, Alice. It’s all we really have in the end to make art with. Like Clapton—” He looked over toward where Jean had been standing, but she had walked off a ways, into the crowd, probably smelling an attack coming. This freed Carmen up.
“Interesting comparison,” Carmen said. “Only with Clapton, it was his kid who died. Somebody else’s victim. I don’t think we can bend logic to the point where the accident was our tragedy.”
Alice added, “Like the Menendez brothers crying because they were orphans.”
“Oh boy. The Kenney sisters are out in force today. Moral Mighty Mouses. But hey, sorry, I’m just here to play some songs.” He flipped his guitar over his shoulder, and walked away.
Carmen said, “What kind of humans are we if we forgive ourselves? That’s what he’s done, just forgiven himself.”
Back in front of Alice’s loft, she asked them up.
“You’re too tired,” Carme
n said.
“I’ll lie down. You can take care of me a little.”
They all got into the enormous, groaning freight elevator. Walter stood stock-still. Elevators bewildered him. He didn’t seem to get why they had to go into the box, then out of the box. In the studio, Carmen set out a bowl of water for him, and Gabe propped up a painting he had been working on. The subject was a set of steps leading down to a darkened basement. He loved painting at Alice’s, in a serious studio. They watched him set up in his fussy way. Everything needed to be exactly here, or right there.
“Sometimes I worry he’s too easy,” Alice said once he was out of earshot. “I mean, what did we do to deserve him?”
“But you know he’s going to have to hate us for a while, probably soon. He almost hated me over the Heather thing. He’s going to get to that place a few more times.”
“I know. So he won’t be living with you when he’s thirty-five,” Alice said. “Like in some Tennessee Williams play.”
“Right,” Carmen said. “So he’s not hanging around doing my hair.”
“Washing out your dress shields,” Alice said. “By hand.” She was clearly happy to be home, perched on her sofa—the old ruby red velvet monster she’d hung on to, from the co-op. In her new prosperity she had had it recovered and refinished back to the lurid glory of its youth. It was more than a sofa; it had the authority of a davenport. Perching turned out to be too strenuous and Alice let herself fall back on the bed pillows propped against one arm. They gossiped a little. Carmen told Alice that Jean had inadvertently got knocked up. That Tom had behaved badly. Now Jean said she was doing some serious thinking.
“Is she going to keep the baby?”
“I don’t think that is the direction of the serious thinking.”
Alice said, “I have to tell you something about Horace and Loretta. They asked me to dinner last week. They had some good news and, blahblahblah, could I meet them at Geja’s?”
Carmen nods. “They love Geja’s.” To show solidarity with Nick, Carmen had seen very little of their parents since the birthday party debacle. Which was a little ironic since Nick himself still saw them. (At least it was the last of those hideous birthday parties; at least it killed that tradition.) Alice saw Horace as the ticket price to Loretta, whom she still—for reasons Carmen couldn’t fathom—cared about.
“I know. Give them their long forks and their bubbling cheese and they’re happy. Anyway, when I got there, I told them I wasn’t hungry. On account of the mono. The mono is great that way. I can get away with anything I don’t want to do. And I really can’t eat fondue with them. There’s just something, don’t you think, queasy-making about plunging bread into the same cheese bucket as your parents?
“They’re already having wine when I get there—drinking it out of glasses; mercifully, Horace didn’t bring that goatskin thing with him. Anyway Mom says he’s been offered a show at the Walker in Minneapolis. And I say something like ‘Hey, that’s great!’ I mean it’s years since he’s been taken seriously. And then she says it’s a very special show and I start smelling a rat. A big rat.”
“I’m smelling it a little, too,” Carmen said.
“I could see Loretta was the designated hitter. She told me they want it to be a father-daughter extravaganza. ‘Kenney: Two Generations.’ Horace told me that was a title they’re bouncing around. I, of course, haven’t been included in the bouncing.”
“They didn’t approach Dad at all, did they?” Carmen said.
“Of course not. It might have been his gallery that called them, but it was probably just Horace on his own hook driving up there one day. He’s still totally capable of that sort of ballsy behavior.”
“What’d you say to Mom?”
“Well, what could I say without looking like Camus’s stranger? I told her it sounded great. Gabriella is going to be totally pissed off. They’re so serious over there. The Walker might be sentimental, but my gallery won’t be.”
Carmen noticed the pillows on the sofa were pretty bedraggled. “Let me put fresh cases on these,” she said. When she came back, Alice was making a wimpy attempt to straighten up her sick bay.
“I’m reading all these cheesy dyke novels from the forties and fifties.” She gestured to small, soft, teetering piles around the couch. Carmen bent to scoop up a handful. The covers had a sinister tone, usually represented by a woman in a black or red slip. “They’re all great,” she told Carmen. “They’re like Greek tragedies. Everyone gets horribly punished in the end. Or they hang themselves with a belt over the steam pipe.”
“But weren’t these somebody’s real, tortured life once?” Carmen said.
“Well, sure, but now they’re more like folktales. Hardships of our ancestors. Like Lincoln walking ten miles to school every day through the snow. That sort of thing, only in bars.”
“So sad for them,” Carmen said.
“Yes, of course,” Alice said. “But don’t you think the sex was probably great?”
“Just lie down now and rest,” she ordered Alice, gave her a little push for good measure. “Do you have any of that soup left?”
“In the fridge.”
“I’ll heat it up.” Carmen got this stuff for Alice from a Tibetan place on Sheridan. It was a remedy soup, hard to tell what was in it. It was extremely herbal and aromatic, the flavor was something like mush-room/VapoRub. But it really seemed to help with the sore throat.
When she came back with a bowl, she sat on the floor in front of the couch while Alice ate.
“What do you think?” Gabe came out of the studio holding up his painting, bracing the sides of the canvas with the palms of his hands. His method was using the smallest brushes he could find, starting in one corner, without gridding the rest, and just painting his way out of the corner by assembling a huge number of tiny details. He now had his staircase completely done. He had put in the first cobwebs.
“Cool,” Alice said, leaning forward over her soup to see the painting’s detail. “Very cool. You sure you want to be painting in that shirt, though?” It was a lurid Hawaiian shirt, luscious with flowers. “Where’d you get that anyway?”
“It’s a surfer shirt. Maude brought it for me from California. Last week at Grandma’s birthday party.”
The conversation clenched. This would be Gabe’s other grandma, Matt’s mother, Marie. Maude was crazy about Gabe and took the opportunity to spoil him a little whenever she was in town. Carmen didn’t mention these visits to Alice as they invariably induced the same look she was getting now. Grim, crazed bravery. The French Lieutenant’s Woman on hearing that the lieutenant had just been seen riding through the village. Carmen hated this look, hated that Maude was still able to elicit this much pain from Alice just by her existence somewhere in the world, out of Alice’s reach.
Part of Carmen’s opinion of Maude came from her being Matt’s sister, guilt by association. But really, she was annoying enough all on her own. She came back once, after her divorce, for about ten minutes, the length of time she could apparently bear to be queer. Then she rushed back to being a straight person, or to some more complex idea of who she was that wasn’t defined by Alice. Somewhere during these ten minutes, Alice, after putting up a pathetic impersonation of indifference, let her defenses completely crumple and threw herself at Maude. She sold the farm. Carmen told her not to sell the farm, but Alice sold it—a quick and complete liquidation of agricultural assets. Followed by Maude leaving yet again.
It was usually not, Carmen had told Alice, a good situation when the same person provided both the pain and the analgesic. Also, Carmen didn’t understand Alice’s ability to maintain such a renewable present. For Carmen, the present had become so heavy with past. She could be going up a flight of stairs in an old apartment building and suddenly she was moving through something invisible but dense, something a decade thick. Some particular combination of landings littered with sneakers and earth shoes and moon boots and bicycles. Groaning floorboards and worn carpet an
d varnish and incense and cat litter and curry would drag her back through compressed time like an undertow, up a hundred staircases—to birthday parties, babysitters, the sofa of her Jungian analyst, the tables of massage therapists, the hearty dinners of chicken baked with rice and mushroom soup, rent and fire parties thrown for friends in crises, political strategy meetings. By now the present had become a very crowded place for her. If only she could impress this idea—factoring the past into the present—on Alice. But she didn’t have the heart to hammer on her now, sick as she was. And in any event, Alice had moved from disturbance and sorrow to having fallen asleep.
“No offense intended,” she said, waking a little, groggy, and reached down to touch Carmen’s mangled ear. “It’s the mono.”
“None taken,” Carmen said, then just sat on the floor, her back against the sofa, her head by Alice’s, Alice’s breath passing over the hair at her temple. She pitied everyone who didn’t have a sister.
pad sieu
If Nick weren’t Alice’s brother, if he were just a friend, she supposed they would have drifted apart long ago. But they were not friends. They were here to keep each other from spinning off alone into the dark matter of the universe. They never said this aloud. Instead they held small rituals, concocted ordinary traditions; they tried to seem like everyone else, like two people in a snapshot. For instance, the two of them had November birthdays a week and three years apart; every year they found a midpoint and treated each other to dinner. This year Alice was turning thirty-five, Nick thirty-two. She suggested they meet at a Thai restaurant up on Broadway; they’d been there before.